“We should not sort athletes by what sex they are, but rather by their skill,” Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano write in “Playing with the Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal in Sports.” At first glance, this book might seem one more example of gender equality gone wild, like coed bathrooms or pornography for women. Mixed-sex football? But give the authors a chance to make their argument and they begin to play with your head. Their book isn’t well-written, and it’s no fun to read, but start thinking about the issues they raise and you may never stop.
Their fundamental point is that the present sexual segregation in sport is based not on physical reality but on anachronistic notions of women as “the weaker sex.” Begin with the rules governing sport. Why should female tennis players be limited to three sets in the majors when the men play five? No reason at all. Why isn’t there a 10-second rule in women’s basketball? Why do female speed skaters compete at shorter distances?
Now extend the logic a little. Is there any legitimate reason why women aren’t umpires in baseball and referees in football? In certain sports, like horse-racing, car-racing and equestrian events, men and women compete on an equal basis. Why not in billiards and chess? In riflery, college teams are coed, but in a fine demonstration of the Olympic Committee’s instinctive and annoying conservatism, Olympic shooting competitions are segregated. This stance was already out of date by the 1940s (Broadway’s Annie Oakley: “Anything you can do, I can do better”).
Actually, the sexual integration that McDonagh and Pappano call for is taking place around the country even as you read this. Everyone is familiar with the efforts of Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie to integrate professional golf, and they are probably only the beginning. Girls play on boys’ teams in Little League baseball, and there have even been female place kickers in college football. So why can’t women be kickers in professional football — as long as they can take the hits?
Then shouldn’t women’s sports be abolished altogether? No, the authors rightly argue, because the men, with their superior physical strength, would overwhelm the women. Just think of what would happen in basketball. It makes sense to have separate women’s sports, but it also makes sense to allow women to enter men’s competitions if they are capable. We’re interested in the best athletes in a sport, not the best male athletes.
Besides, there are areas where women have a physical edge over men, like endurance. (Female rats run longer than male rats, as do male rats who have been given estrogen.) If ultra marathons and long-distance swimming ever become popular sports, we may have to establish separate races for men because of their physical disadvantages. In dogsledding, we may need separate Iditarods.
You can see that a lot of thinking is required to sort all this out. And the examples above are the easy cases. The real can of worms is opened up with sports like gymnastics and figure skating, where the judging is based on supposed sexual differences: strength for men, grace for women. Is this another outmoded gender distinction? McDonagh and Pappano seem to think so. They envision couples-skating with a larger woman lifting a smaller man.
I don’t think so. Let me put it bluntly: just as women overall will never match men in sheer body strength, so men overall will never match women in gracefulness. If this is wrong, we can expect to see enormous changes in rhythmic gymnastics.
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